Behold: The world’s smallest 1TB flash drive

Sandisk’s pen drive is a tiny tera, and USB-C

Recently, while trying to install Windows 10 on a PC without a DVD drive, I found myself infuriated by the lack of decently-sized USB drives in my house. So many pointless 512mb, 1GB and 2GB pen drives, but not a single 8GB one on hand.

Sandisk’s latest USB drive is not only the same physical size as all of these, but it would have enough space for Windows 10 some 125 times over. The USB stick looks the same as any other pen drive, but has a whopping one terabyte of storage built in.

Pen drives with that quantity of storage (and higher) do already exist. Take Kingston’s Data Traveler Ultimate GT, which comes in sizes of up to 2TB. The main difference is that while the Kingston model looks like a particularly angular USB stick got hungry and turned to pen drive cannibalism, the Sandisk stick would blend in with the many others in my drawer.

There’s another difference though: Sandisk’s new USB stick is USB-Type C. While that may be a dealbreaker for anyone with older laptops or computers (though adapters are easy enough to find), it does mean it’s both future proofed and capable of working with most recent Android smartphones. The microUSB connection has largely gone out of fashion in smartphones with the Samsung Galaxy S7 being the last major flagship to include it.

This is only a prototype for now, and Sandisk has no release date or price. Given that even the 1TB version of the chunky Data Traveler above goes for around $1500, you would suspect that only wealthy data hounds need apply for Sandisk’s latest, if and when it hits retail. The rest of us will have to make do with a pocket full of 128GB sticks.

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